Perpetual Afternoon

We sit on the sand. The roaring wind muffles the rising curve of the ocean. She’s wrapped in a makeshift blanket fashioned out of a tiger towel purchased long ago on a hot and dusty French afternoon. I stare through my sunglasses at the world beyond the shades.

The beach is swimming in hues of silvery blue and a path dances over the waves to a far off horizon. Would it whisk us away into cherished memories of time past or hurl us into the unknown moments of time future? Who can say? Merely to gaze at it admits the possibility of either.

Children run, the gulls circle and dogs chase rings around one another. Like any and another Sunday afternoon before it and yet not quite. Such a one never once was and never yet will be again.

For, it is impossible to step twice in the same river. (Heraclitus fr. 91)

We rise and the waves walk across the sand towards us. Perhaps today the ocean will swallow us whole and take us to the palaces of the deep where lovely mermaids flow. I flee as the icy water laps my ankles and she follows shrieking, her hands full of shells and deep sea plunder. 

With frisbee coming at the close of play the dog leaps up to intercept and is banished from the sand to allow for fun’s survival. He walks away and stops dead in his tracks, disorientated by the shrunken family group. He sniffs the breezes in a vain attempt to locate any trace of his vanished master. Loss is written all over his forehead as we inch back towards the car.

The palm trees nod to one another and join hands in the sky’s dropping light behind us. The car leaves the beach and all of its water filled wonder behind. The powerful gods of concrete and steel beckon as we join the flow of the freeway and fly away back to our city of squalor and angels.